ABSTRACT

The research is done to figure out what is the reading vocabulary size that MARA

College Banting students possess and to what extend does it able to affect the students’

efficiency in completing the sentences. 20 students were taken to be respondents and they were

divided into 2 groups, one with those who are expected to be fluent in using English and another

one which is not. 2 experiments were done in 2 days and the vocabularies chosen for the

experiment are taken from the TOEFL vocabulary test, medium level. The hypothesis in mind

was that students with larger vocabulary size will be able to complete the sentences with better

efficiency compared to those with lower vocabulary size.

To increase the consistency of the research, all the 20 respondents are decided to be

male, second language users, have the same age – which is 19 – and from the Malay ethnicity.

Experiment A tests on the students’ vocabulary size while Experiment B, which was conducted a

day later, was done to see how the vocabulary size assist them in answering the questions. The

questions from Experiment A and B are identical. The only difference is that option answers are

given in Experiment A while in Experiment B, clues are given at each question and students are

to answer them by filling in the blank given. When the experiments ended, the analysis was done

and most of it was based on personal interpretations supported by some interviews with the

students, relevant arguments and also assisted by suitable secondary research.

The discussion that was made focuses on

, each group there will be 3 types of student, judged by their level of English competency

in writing – 4 people at low level, 3 people at medium level and another 3 people at high level

English competency. As for the first group, they are given a set of 10 questions; each question
consists of a sentence with a blank where students are supposed to fill it with verb, adjectives or

anything that they like, provided that it is suitable with the sentence. A total time of 30 seconds is

allocated to answer one question. The step is then repeated 4 times so that the students can fill in

the same blank with 4 another different words. After all the 10 questions are answered, the data

is then collected and tabulated.

As for the second group, the method is exactly the same but the students are provided

with extra handout where many titles of articles are pasted. The titles of articles given are of high

quality verb and each of the students are expected to fill in or produced verb of high quality as

well in the blanks. After all of the 10 questions are answered, the data is again collected and

tabulated.

The results from group 1 and group 2 are compared to be analyzed. Students in group 2

are expected to produce better verbs in the blanks compared with students in group 1. But still,

that doesn’t mean that students with high level of competency in group 1 cannot produce better

verbs compared to students with low and medium level of competency in group 2. The high level

of competency in English might as well means that they have a wide variety of vocabulary to be

used, hence, helping them to produce high quality verbs.

Another aspect that is used to analyze the data is at what number of trials students

produce quality verb expected. Each question is set to have a certain power verb that only the

tester knows. From the data collected, the students are judged at which number of trials they

produce the power verb set. Students with better level of competency in English are expected to

produce quality verb earlier.